What If
We Had Taken Columbine Seriously?

The political discourse since the killings last year
has been foolish, escapist, and cowardly.

Columbine may matter a lot politically, as attested to by the
frenzy to exploit the anniversary of that day when two students
slaughtered 12 classmates and a teacher, injuring 23 others. Yet
the real lesson of Columbine is that very few people care enough
about the horrible events of April 20, 1999, to try to prevent
their recurrence. Proposals that are manifestly irrelevant—such
as more police in the schools, or special restrictions on gun
shows—are touted, while proposals that could really make a
difference—such as banning all guns, or arming teachers—are
shunned. That the year after Columbine has been spent on trivial
and irrelevant debates—instead of on serious proposals to save
lives—is a sign of the degeneracy of our political culture.
Let’s consider the favorite palliatives for preventing future
Columbines.

At the time of the attack, Columbine High School had a full-time
“school resource officer,” i.e., a sheriff’s deputy. The officer
engaged in a brief gunfight with the two murderers, at the start
of their rampage near an entrance to the school. Neither the
deputy nor the killers scored any hits. The deputy stayed
outside the building to care for a wounded student. His brief
gunfight probably saved two lives, by distracting one of the
killers from a student and teacher he was about to murder. The
gunfight also gave other students a few extra seconds in which
to flee the building.

Having shot their way past the guard, the killers entered
Columbine High School, and began looking for people to kill.
Although police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and SWAT team
members began arriving at the school quickly, none of them
entered the building for 20 minutes.

The killers (let’s omit their names, to deny them some small
measure of the notoriety they craved) had planned to detonate
bombs inside the building, and then shoot down the fleeing
survivors. The plan was probably derived from the Jonesboro,
Arkansas, middle school shooting of March 24, 1998, in which two
boys set off a fire alarm and then shot and killed a teacher and
four students as they fled.

When the bombs failed to detonate according to plan, the
Columbine killers began shooting students face-to-face, most of
them in the library, near the building entrance where the
murderers had their gunfight with the deputy. Teacher Patti
Nielson was in the library along with many students. Nielson
immediately called 911 from a library phone. She followed the
911 operator’s instructions to keep the students inside the
library and wait for the police to arrive. That turned out to be
a death sentence for 10 students. The two killers entered the
library and began taunting the students, then killing them one
by one. Through the open 911 line, the police dispatcher could
hear the students being gunned down.

Columbine High School sits on sloping land, so even though the
library is on the second story, the library is accessible from
the ground. The library door opens to a hallway, and is only 15
steps away from an exit door. While one murder after another was
being perpetrated in the library, a dozen police officers were
stationed near this exit. These officers made no attempt to
enter the building, walk 15 steps, and confront the murderers,
who gunned down their classmates with impunity. According to
police officers speaking on condition of anonymity, one Denver
SWAT officer did begin to enter but was immediately “ordered
down” by commanders.

Twenty minutes after the rampage began, three SWAT officers were
finally sent into the building—on the first floor. Finding
students rushing out of the building, they decided to escort
students out, rather than track down the killers. This was the
beginning of a police program to “contain the perimeter.”
Officers went from classroom to classroom, frisking students,
searching closets, and taking students out of the building.
These procedures were followed in case there were more than two
gunmen in the building, or in case one or more of the killers
was trying to blend in with other students.

The perimeter containment program began on the first floor, on
the side of the building furthest from where the library
killings were in progress. The two murderers eventually tired of
the library killings, and went downstairs to the cafeteria. A
surveillance tape in the cafeteria captures their dejection at
failing to kill hundreds of people, as they had planned.

Near the cafeteria, more students were hiding in a room, with
the door locked. The two murderers attempted to shoot off the
lock, and enter that room, so as to kill more victims. Students
in the room had called 911 and the line was open, so again the
killers’ location was known. Many police officers were massed
near the cafeteria door. They knew where the murderers were.
They knew that the murderers were attempting to get into a room
to kill more people. The police stood idle.

Failing to shoot their way into the room near the cafeteria, the
murderers returned to the library upstairs. The students were
still there, some dead, some wounded, waiting for the police to
come. But instead of resuming their spree, the two murderers
killed themselves.

The police, meanwhile, continued “containing the perimeter” one
room at a time, working from the end of the building where the
killers weren’t. It took hours for them to get to the library.
In another second-story room, science teacher Dave Sanders bled
to death. He might have been saved by faster action—as was every
wounded student who received prompt medical attention.

The national media ignored the police inaction. The Colorado
media covered almost every aspect of Columbine intensively. For
weeks afterward, Columbine was the lead story on local
television and in the state’s two major papers, the Denver Post
and the Rocky Mountain News. But except for KOA radio hosts Dan
Caplis and Mike Rosen, hardly anyone said anything about the
deadly over-caution of the police. Partly, there was a
commendable reluctance by the media to shift any blame away from
the two murderers themselves. And partly, too, there was a
widespread feeling that it would be ignoble to question the work
of the police in hindsight, given the chaos of that day.

But the police themselves are not so confident that their
tactics were above reproach. Many of the SWAT officers on the
scene that day were brave men who were horrified that their
commanders had forbidden them to assault the killers. The
Jefferson County Sheriff’s office felt vulnerable enough to
second-guessing that it asked members of the infamous Los
Angeles Police Department SWAT team to analyze the police
response at Columbine. The LAPD officers concluded that the SWAT
teams on the Columbine scene had followed standard procedures.

Indeed, they had. “Officer safety” is the mantra of police
tactics. About 90 percent of SWAT team call-outs are no-knock
break-ins of the homes of suspected drug dealers. There is no
earthly reason why a police officer should die just to arrest a
drug dealer. Much less frequently, a SWAT team may respond to a
hostage situation, such as a bungled bank robbery, in which the
robber is holding bank patrons at gunpoint.

Columbine, however, was different. Children were being murdered.
Nevertheless, the officer-safety rule prevailed. Very simply,
the police commanders decided that protecting officers from a
risk to their lives was more important than attempting to stop
the murder of student after student after student after student
after student after student after student after student after
student after student. Based on the police inaction when the
murderers were attempting to break into the room near the
cafeteria, and further inaction when the murderers returned to
the library where they had already killed 10 students, it is
clear that no matter how many students were going to be killed,
not one officer’s life would be risked.

If the teacher in the library had led the students out of the
building in a mad dash, some would probably have been shot as
they ran. Still, many lives would have been saved, since it’s
much harder to hit a moving target than it is to hit someone at
point-blank range who is begging for her life. Instead, the
teacher waited, as the 911 operator following proper procedure
told her to do. And the students followed their teacher’s order.
Thus, the killers had their way for 40 minutes—it could have
been much longer if they had not then killed themselves—to gun
down one person after another. And the police secured the
perimeter.

There have been several school shootings in recent years, and
not one has been stopped by the police. Whatever the other
benefits police provide to society, stopping a school shooting
in progress is not one of them. There are plenty of courageous
men in police uniform: When will one of them summon the moral
seriousness to insist that “procedures” be suspended if, God
forbid, another school shooting occurs?

“How do I feel? Like banning all guns,” wrote Molly Ivins
immediately after the Columbine massacre. Of all the gun control
proposals discussed after Columbine, this is the only one which
plausibly could have stopped the murders.

It is true that murderers can use many different tools to
accomplish their objective. The largest school murder in
American history, perpetrated by a Michigan school board member
in 1927, used explosives. But the weapon of choice in modern
school killings has been a gun. The Columbine killers had
planted propane bombs all over the school. None of these killed
anyone, although some people were seriously injured with
shrapnel. Killing people with bombs is difficult for amateurs,
even with instructions from the Internet. Guns, on the other
hand, are easy to use. They allow even a weak person to project
potentially deadly force. This very quality, which makes guns so
handy on defense, also allowed a couple of punks to become mass
killers at Columbine.

Accordingly, if all guns vanished, crimes like the Columbine
massacre would be much less likely to occur. It’s true, of
course, that criminals would be freer in general to go
marauding, with greater assurance that their victims would not
resist. This is what has happened in Britain and Australia, as
those nations have outlawed defensive gun ownership and
confiscated many (but not all) guns. But we are concerned here
with policies that would prevent future Columbines, not with gun
policy in general.

A second objection is that gun prohibition would devastate civil
liberties, and be a miserable failure besides—just as alcohol
prohibition in the 1920s and drug prohibition today have failed
to prevent the black market from supplying the prohibited goods.
True enough. But this objection relates only to the feasibility
of the proposal, and does not undercut the fact that effective
gun prohibition would probably have prevented Columbine.

And while the curtailing of civil liberties might cause people
who venerate the Constitution to recoil, it is not a meaningful
objection to anti-gun groups. They push for prohibition all the
time, for various classes of guns—automatic machine guns,
semi-automatic “assault weapons,” small, inexpensive handguns,
or all handguns, or .50 caliber rifles, or “sniper rifles.”

They also insist that gun owners are too incompetent and
emotionally unstable to use guns defensively, and are more
likely to kill or maim family members than criminals, so the
groups are obviously not inhibited by fear that gun prohibition
would empower criminals. No, given their belief in the efficacy
of prohibition of certain types of guns, their failure to push
for total gun prohibition is a failure of nerve and seriousness.

Several months before the Columbine massacre, the killers
obtained firearms from two suppliers. The first was a
22-year-old Columbine graduate named Mark Manes (ironically, the
son of a longtime Handgun Control, Inc., activist). Manes bought
a pistol at a gun show and gave it to the two killers (who were
under 18 at the time). Colorado law prohibits giving handguns to
juveniles, with certain exceptions, and Manes is currently
serving time for this offense in a Colorado prison. The second
supplier was an 18-year-old fellow student at Columbine, Robyn
Anderson, who bought three long guns for the killers at a
Denver-area gun show in December 1998.

When guns are bought from firearms dealers, federal law requires
that the sale be approved by the FBI, via the National Instant
Check System. Both Manes and Anderson were lawful gun purchasers
and could legally have bought the guns from a firearms dealer at
a gun store, a gun show, or anywhere else.

In Colorado (as in most other states), when guns are bought from
a private individual who is not—as the federal statute says,
“engaged in the business” of selling firearms—the National
Instant Check System (NICS) and associated paperwork are not
involved. If a gun collector sells a pistol to a neighbor or
rents a table at a gun show and sells a pair of shotguns one
weekend, no FBI permission is required.
Both Manes and Anderson bought guns from collectors at gun shows
and thus were not subject to the NICS check, although if they
had been, they would have been approved.

The laws described above are exactly the same wherever the
firearms transaction takes place. Sales by gun dealers need NICS
permission no matter where the sales take place, and sales by
private collectors do not.

Nevertheless, shortly after the Columbine killings, the various
gun prohibition groups began putting out press releases about
the “gun show loophole.” This is an audacious lie, since there
is no “loophole” involving gun shows. The law at gun shows is
exactly the same as it is everywhere else.

Mark Manes committed a felony by obtaining a handgun for the
young killers. He has never claimed that the existence of
another law, regarding gun show sales, would have deterred him.

What about Robyn Anderson?

On June 4, 1999, Good Morning America presented a “kids
and guns” program. Anderson was flown to Washington for the
segment. The first part of the program discussed various
proposals, including background checks on private sales at gun
shows. Immediately after the introductory segment, Diane Sawyer
introduced Robyn Anderson and asked:

“Anything you hear this morning [that would] have stopped you
from accompanying them and help[ing] them buy the guns?”
Anderson replied: “I guess if it had been illegal, if I had
known that it was illegal, I wouldn’t have gone.” On January 26,
2000, Anderson began claiming that even if the purchase were
legal, but there had been a background check of her entirely
clean record, she would not have purchased the guns.

Whichever version is true, the facts show that Anderson was not
afraid to divulge her identity when buying a gun for her wicked
friends. When Good Morning America
asked, “And they actually paid for the guns, or did you?”
Anderson replied: “It was their money, yes. All I did was show a
driver’s license.” (The private collectors asked to see a
driver’s license to verify that she was over 18, even though
there was no legal requirement that they do so.) Since Anderson
did not mind revealing her identity to three separate sellers,
is it realistic to believe that revealing her identity for an
instant check would have stopped her? The Colorado instant
background check does not keep permanent records on gun buyers,
so even with background checks on private sales at gun shows,
there would have been no permanent record of Anderson’s
purchase. And Anderson’s new and improved talking points claim
only that the prospect of a permanent record would have deterred
her.

Putting aside Anderson’s shifting stories, she is plainly an
irresponsible, self-centered person. After the murders took
place, she refused to come forward and help the police
investigation. It took an anonymous tip for the police to find
out about her. And in marked contrast to Mark Manes, Anderson
has never apologized for her role in the Columbine murders.

Even if you accept the version of Robyn Anderson’s stories that
is most supportive of gun control, no gun-show crackdown would
have prevented Columbine. The older of the two killers could
have bought his own guns in a store legally. Indeed, in a
videotape made before the killings, the murderers said that if
they had not obtained their guns the way they did, they would
have found other ways. There is no reason to disbelieve them on
this point.

The only law that would have some effect on Robyn Anderson and
similar gun molls was introduced in the Colorado legislature
this year by Don Lee, a staunchly pro-Second Amendment state
representative whose district includes Columbine. His “Robyn
Anderson Bill,” which will become law within a few weeks, makes
it a crime to give a long gun to a juvenile without the consent
of his parents. This law covers Anderson’s first version of her
story, in which she told Good Morning America that the
only deterrent for her would have been a law making her conduct
illegal.

Whatever the other merits of proposals to impose special
restrictions on gun shows, these would not have prevented
Columbine, and it is cynical for their proponents to use
Columbine as a pretext.

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne
LaPierre—speaking at the NRA’s annual meeting in Denver just
after the Columbine massacre—said that America’s schools should
be as gun-free as America’s airports.

In contrast, Yale Law professor John Lott has argued forcefully
that allowing teachers to possess firearms at school would help
prevent, or reduce the fatalities from, school mass murders.
Other small gun groups have made arguments similar to
Lott’s—pointing out, for instance, that Israel abruptly ended
terrorist kidnappings of schoolchildren by arming teachers and
other responsible adults.

While no American school massacre has ever been stopped by the
police, two have been stopped by armed citizens. In 1997 in
Pearl, Mississippi, a 16-year-old Satanist murdered his
ex-girlfriend and her friend and wounded seven other students at
his high school. As he was preparing to leave the high school
and kill children at a nearby junior high school, assistant
principal Joel Myrick got his .45 handgun from his car, put it
to the killer’s head, and held him at bay until the police
arrived five minutes later.

Not long after, in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, a school rampage
abruptly ended when local merchant James Strand used a shotgun
to convince the teenage killer to surrender. The teenager had
killed one teacher and wounded one teacher and two classmates.

The objections to encouraging teachers to protect themselves and
their students are vacuous. First, there is the complaint that
armed teachers would send the message that it’s okay to possess
guns. True enough, although this same message is also sent by
the presence of armed police officers in school. In any case, we
expect schools to be able to explain the distinction between
adults doing something and children doing it.

Some critics worry that allowing teachers to have firearms would
lead to accidents. But there has been no increase in gun
accidents in the 31 states where adults are allowed to carry
handguns for protection in public. Moreover, accident concerns
could be addressed by specially stringent rules about gun
storage, locking, or concealment. And it would take a lot of
accidents to exceed the death toll inflicted by current policy,
which guarantees that mass killers at school face no effective
resistance.

One teacher in the Jefferson County School District, which
includes Columbine, has written a detailed proposal for arming
10 percent of school staffs, with only the principal knowing
which teachers and other staff members have firearms. Most
teachers would not want to be armed, but as long as some are,
students would be protected by guardians with the highest
possible motivation. No one has a stronger motivation to save a
victim’s life than does the victim himself. In contrast to
police officers who are safe as long as they stay outside a
school where murders are in progress, teachers inside the
building are already in danger and well motivated to stop a
killer. Moreover, most teachers also have great personal
affection for the students in their care.

Curt Lavarello, executive director of the National Association
of School Resource Officers (whose members have never stopped a
single school shooting), contends that teacher firearms training
would cost millions of dollars.

Well, training teachers in order to prevent teachers and
students from being killed seems rather a good use of millions
of dollars. Besides, there are tens of thousands of certified
firearms instructors in the United States who would gladly
donate time to instruct teachers for free. Six days of training
(a pair of long weekends) will give a teacher more firearms
training than is required for active-duty police officers in
many jurisdictions. You might think one of the major gun groups
would speak in support of such a proposal, but they have turned
out to be not as tough as their reputations.

If Columbine really mattered, this past year would have been
spent in a passionate and edifying debate on total gun
prohibition versus guns as lifesaving tools to protect
schoolchildren. Instead, we have had a ridiculous debate about
72-hour “instant” background checks on private sales at gun
shows versus 24-hour checks. The year could have been spent
discussing the need for new police protocols in Columbine-like
situations, or serious self-defense measures like the arming of
teachers. Instead, we have seen the police posing in heroic
pictures for Time magazine with the killers’ guns, as
if they had been seized in combat, not picked up after the
killers’ suicides.

What Columbine reveals about us is that America, in the words of
Jeffrey Snyder’s 1993 essay in the Public Interest, has become
to a remarkable degree “A Nation of Cowards.”

Consider: Heavily armored police with machine guns protected
themselves, instead of rescuing teenagers who were being
murdered a few yards away. Except for two talk show hosts, the
Colorado and national media virtually ignored this reprehensible
failure to act.

The anti-gun groups failed to push for the one item in their
arsenal that could have prevented Columbine.

The major pro-gun groups failed to push for the one item in
their arsenal that could have prevented Columbine.

And the worst of it is this: The leaders of these groups
flinched not out of personal weakness but because both were
pandering to congressmen who themselves lacked the nerve to take
Columbine seriously. And these members of Congress were chosen
in free elections by the American people, whose own lack of
seriousness they well represent.

The pro- and anti-gun groups failed to push for serious
anti-Columbine laws because their polling told them that the
vast majority of the American public could not bear to hear such
proposals.

And so, if there are two more people in America with hearts as
depraved and souls as evil as the Columbine killers, your
children and mine are just as much at risk as they were the day
before Columbine.

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